by Rhea Watson
Most of my cellblock had already found their tables, that handsy demon and his posse occupying one near the middle, then Rafe and his gorgeous—albeit intense—shifter friend choosing one near the outskirts by the tray return counter. While it might have been helpful, I wasn’t here to make friends. In the end, prisoners were out for themselves, and Rafe might have laid on the charm to shut me up last night, but I refused to trust anyone.
Especially the shifter who wouldn’t stop staring at me. Elijah. A shiver cut down my spine the second our eyes clashed across the sea of tables. When he looked at me, it was like he was looking straight through me, right down to the marrow, and I didn’t like that. Not one bit. Not when he made me weak-kneed and vulnerable with nothing but a glance.
Since there wasn’t a chance in hell I’d throw my hat in with the demon who’d licked my ear twice while purring into it yesterday, I beelined away from my cellblock and scanned the countless other faces, searching for the most unassuming of the bunch. Eventually, I settled on another loner: a woman in a dark blue jumpsuit like Elijah—shifter, then, if we were all divided by our most basic identity. Smaller than me, probably a little shorter too, she sat poking at her eggs with a scowl, her hair a peppery brown, and when I wandered closer, I noted one of her eyes had clouded over.
A crippled shifter… Rare. Their genetics healed just about any wound, but as I gnawed at my lower lip, debating whether or not to join her, I also wondered if the collars muted healing abilities too. Had someone done that to her in here? Fear mottled in my belly—made my already unappetizing breakfast seem so beyond gross I gagged. Good morning, anxiety puke. Like I needed to make that kind of scene in front of everyone and totally obliterate my prison rep.
Okay, Katja, make a move. Supers at the surrounding tables were already starting to glance my way—strangers who looked infinitely more terrifying than the shifter. So, choice made.
“Hey.” I stopped at one of the metal stools across from her, my empty belly somersaulting when she peered up. “Can I sit here?”
Her one good eye gave me a quick once-over, and she nodded, her features delicate and angular. Beautiful. Easily mistaken for a fae or elf maiden if it weren’t for the jumpsuit.
“Sure,” she said, her accent suggesting bounty hunters had scooped her up from Australia. As she nodded at the spot in front of me, I sat in a hurry, and the shifter grabbed her own slightly burnt English muffin, slowly picking a little piece off. “And pro tip—don’t ask anyone for anything in here. Just take it.”
Yikes. Another prison faux pas. How on earth was I going to survive this? “Oh. Right.”
“It’s just…” She popped the sliver of bread into her mouth, chewing daintily with a grimace. “Some of the creeps in this place will take your manners and run with them, you know? Asking makes you weak.”
My stomach gurgled, looping and churning, desperate for sustenance. “Noted.”
We ate in silence for a little while. No one had offered me a utensil, but I noticed the shifter had a spoon.
“You can buy them in commissary,” she said tersely when she caught me staring. “No buying privileges until after your first month. They made you give bank details, right?” My nod had her rolling her eyes, the clear one a warm dark brown. “You can only have a max of twenty dollars in your account at a time so nobody cleans out the shop, but you can expect they’re already charging you rent for your stay in paradise.”
Fantastic. In five years, I’d probably walk out of here with nothing—especially if someone seized Café Crowley in my absence. Hopefully—please—Annalise would start a search for me as soon as she realized I wasn’t there. Because if I hadn’t opened the café, she had to know I was either kidnapped or dead.
“First day here?” the shifter asked as I glowered at my disgusting eggs, which, after a taste test, proved to be overcooked, a little dry, and… well, exactly how I imagined greyish eggs would taste: downright terrible.
“Pretty much, yeah,” I muttered, moving on to the orange juice carton. It might have been lukewarm to the touch, but after peeling the plastic lid and taking the tiniest sip, it at least tasted like fresh oranges, albeit almost too tangy for my liking.
“Innocent?”
I glanced across the round table at her, eyebrows shooting up. “Uh, yeah. You?”
“Figured. You’ve got the look.” She popped another miniscule piece in her mouth, delicate and deliberate in the way she ate this crap. “They said I trafficked kids.” Her eyes watered, and she busied herself with her muffin, sniffling. “Because apparently the only reason for a rabbit shifter to have so many kids in their home is because I, I dunno, trafficked them in.” She looked up helplessly, her lower lip trembling, and it was then I noted the faint rings around her eyes. Not sleeping all that well in here either. Another sniffle prompted her to swipe the back of her hand under her nose, and she shrugged. “I just… We have a lot of kids.”
Rabbit shifter with a whole gaggle of kids? Yeah, that checked out. Many shifters reflected their animal counterparts in their everyday lives, and rabbits were said to have a boatload of offspring. Rabbit shifters, meanwhile, were rumored to have harems, usually consisting of a single female and multiple males. As I did a quick sweep of the pretty shifter across from me, I wondered just how many husbands she had waiting for her on the outside—and just how many kids was a lot. She didn’t look much older than me, and at twenty-nine, I was still in the “thank the gods I’m not pregnant” phase. Thank you, magically brewed birth control. The stuff lasted a whole year when done correctly, and despite my abysmal love life, I still had needs—needs that I scratched every few months to mediocre results.
No babies yet.
But the shifter across from me looked like it killed her not to have her babies by her side. Her whole face had fallen, and she picked miserably at her muffin in silence. My heart almost broke for her, but I swallowed hard and steeled myself. After all, this was prison. Innocent as she looked, nice as she sounded, this rabbit shifter could be a psychopath. Maybe that was why no one was sitting with her.
“I… I’m sorry,” I said at last. While I wasn’t about to accept everything that came out of her mouth, she’d have to be an A-list actress to pull off the pain in her eyes right now. Well. Eye. “That’s so awful—to be a mom accused of that.” Her slight nod and a much louder sniffle tugged at my heartstrings, and I cleared my throat, pushing through. “They said I… sold love potions to humans.”
She snorted, blinking back what looked like a sudden rush of tears. “Oh. Wow. That’s embarrassing. Don’t go around telling people that if you want any sort of reputation in here.”
“I’m sure I can jazz it up,” I mused, a barely there grin stretching across my lips for the first time since I’d arrived as she chuckled. “I’m Katja.”
“Willow,” she offered with a bob of her head. I still wasn’t sure about the policies on physical contact in here, but I figured neither of us wanted to attract a guard’s attention by shaking hands. Willow stabbed her spoon at her eggs, her little half-smile faltering before she went back to picking at her English muffin. “I wish they had, like, a speck of green on here.”
“I bet it’d be wilted.”
We swapped smirks again; nothing bonded two complete strangers like complaining about the same horrible thing. As the breakfast chatter rose, all the cellblocks fed and seated, we finished the rest of our meal in silence. At one point, it seemed like a super in a grey jumpsuit was about to make a move and claim a stool at our table, but when we both glanced his way, he scuttled off and eventually ate standing up near one of the guards. Willow rolled her eyes as she ripped open her orange juice carton, watching him with a scowl.
“That will get you punched. Don’t hesitate. He should know better.”
“Speaking of, uhm, knowing…” I pushed my tray to the side, officially done with the scrambled eggs and their grey tinge. If you picked off the burnt bits, the plain muffin wasn’t half bad, and even thou
gh I still tasted the metallic tang with every swig of juice, at least the sugar would give me a boost for an hour or two. “You can totally say no, but… do you know anything about the supers in my cellblock?”
“They opened your block just after mine came close to capacity, so I know a bit.” Chin propped up on her fist, Willow pushed her untouched eggs around her plate with a sigh. “Anyone in particular?”
My mind flashed immediately to Elijah and Rafe. Two men with ridiculously sculpted bodies, obvious from the way their jumpsuits stretched across strong chests and taut arms and thick thighs. Elijah was broader than his vampire counterpart, the sunrise to Rafe’s sunset with a head full of sandy-gold waves that probably curled when they were long enough. Tanned skin. Caramel eyes. Worn hands, like he really worked with them outside of this place.
All that from a fleeting introduction yesterday. I had a feeling he stuck with me because not only was he handsome, but that huge shifter was like sunshine. Warm and alive, a little reminder that there was a big wide world out there. Rafe, meanwhile, had the whole gorgeous, brooding vampire thing going for him. Sharp jawline. Intense eyes. Black hair, brows, and stubble. Pale, but not in a sickly way. Like moonlight. The sun and the moon—Elijah and Rafe.
I blinked a few times when I realized Willow had been staring at me for… well, however long I’d been daydreaming about a pair of inmates—possible criminals. Yeesh. Not a good look on my part.
“Uh, no, no one in particular,” I babbled, cheeks hot and chest tight under Willow’s scrutiny. “All of them, I guess. I’m just not really sure what I’m in for…”
She studied me a few beats longer, the weight of her clouded eye pinned squarely on me more unnerving than I cared to admit. However, after a blink, it seemed like I’d passed the test, and she nodded. “Right, okay.”
I bit the insides of my cheeks, belly looping. Had she just spotted a weakness? A chink in my armor? Something told me I’d need to keep my physical attraction for Elijah and Rafe—and maybe my connection to anyone in here, including Willow—under wraps. No sense in giving any of the real criminals something to manipulate, and besides, I wasn’t here for connection. It was pathetic to get swept up in a pair of muscly male bodies and breathtakingly gruff good looks anyway, because just about every super out there was hot. It gave us an edge over humanity—and I ought to be used to it by now. There were attractive guys aplenty in my community; Elijah and Rafe were just two other smoke shows in a sea of smoke shows.
Time to let them go. Now.
“Cellblock C is pretty quiet from what I hear,” Willow remarked, back to pushing her eggs around. “Deimos, that demon, apparently collected souls too early on the deals he made… It’s a crime in Hell too, so I bet he’s happier to be here than down there again. He smuggles cigarettes in through one of the guards, both the magic and human kind, and rumor has it he’s trying to get into harder stuff.”
Perfect—just what we needed. High shifters and supers, snorting wolfsbane and hotboxing the already stuffy cellblocks. Although Willow merely glanced his way, I turned fully around to scope out Deimos. Surrounded by his Cellblock C posse, he appeared to be engaged in a salacious conversation with some dark-haired beauty I’d never seen before—vampire, given her jumpsuit, her straight black hair thick and glossy as it spilled over her shoulder. She leaned over him, murmuring in his ear, and the second his black gaze started to slip my way, I gave him my back.
“And the vampire he’s talking to?”
Willow scoffed. “She’s queen bee of my cellblock—Anne.”
“Ah.”
“She thinks she’s the Anne Boleyn—and the one they executed was a fraud.”
Well. My eyebrows shot up. That was… unexpected. Willow smirked and nodded.
“Yeah, total psycho. Steer clear if you can.”
I risked a more subtle peek over my shoulder and found both Deimos and Anne staring back. Anne’s red mouth stretched into a predatory smile, like a great white scenting a drop of blood in the ocean, and Deimos blew me a kiss. I shuddered, hating to turn my back on the heavily tattooed demon, scenes of torture and gore inked along his arms and all the way up his neck, but I refused to make eye contact for longer than necessary.
“I don’t know why she’s got everyone under her thumb,” Willow carried on. She’d dropped her voice and leaned in closer, as if worried our conversation had carried, but she didn’t sound all that concerned about being overheard. I mean, she certainly looked calmer than I felt, my insides a jumbled mess, but maybe that kind of confidence would come with time. The rabbit shifter shrugged. “But all I know is that she screws one of our guards regularly and has an actual mattress in her cell, not just the cot cover we all have, so there’s that.”
“Right.” No surprise sex was a currency in a co-ed prison. “And the…” Elijah and Rafe. I downed the rest of my juice, then set the empty carton on my tray. “And the rest of my block?”
“The maenad in the grey is also nuts… Terrible temper,” Willow told me. “Gets put in solitary all the time for her tantrums. The shifters who trail after Deimos like puppies seem like nonstarters. Just a bunch of followers, you know? That warlock in your block tried to feel me up during work duty a few months back and I broke his nose, so naturally they put me in solitary.”
Fire sparked in my gut, infuriated for her. “What?”
“Prison politics blow, girl… Get used to it.” Done with her breakfast, she also nudged her tray aside, most of the food untouched. “Your other two aren’t bad—the dragon and the vampire. Elijah’s an alpha. We can all feel it, but he keeps to himself, which I guess isn’t surprising.”
I forced an air of nonchalance, even when my heart soared at the thought of finally getting some details on him. “Why not?”
“Dragons usually aren’t that big on clans or packs or anything. Pretty territorial, too, from what I’ve heard through the shifter grapevine.”
“Oh, yeah, duh.” I scratched at the back of my neck, hoping to detract from the warmth blossoming in my cheeks. What the hell, body? Get it together. “I should have guessed as much.”
“His vampire friend was in our cellblock for like an hour when he first arrived, then Queen Anne pitched a fit—wouldn’t share her space with another vampire.” Gazing over my shoulder, Willow’s eyes tracked someone on the go, slowly drifting toward the side of the huge, noisy dining hall. “I don’t know much about him either, to be honest. Those two are pretty quiet. Stay out of the shit. Don’t leer. Seem decent… Probably both innocent too. You’ll start to notice the difference the more you get to know the, uh, players in this game.”
“What even is this place?” I muttered, more to myself than anything, but Willow’s heightened hearing must have kicked in, because she snorted and leaned back with a shake of her head.
“If you ever figure it out, feel free to share, because I’ve never heard of a prison for supers, and this place runs like they took a page out of some TV drama, you know?”
At least I wasn’t the only one totally thrown by the idea of not only a supernatural prison, but a prison that held all kinds of shifters and supernatural beings in one place. I might not have blinked twice if all the American covens got together and decided to open an institute to deal with the really shitty witches out there, but this? This was unorthodox—and, frankly, unheard of.
And the fact that innocent people like me—and Willow, potentially—were just thrown in here to rot, clueless and afraid, made me want to explode.
Only I couldn’t.
Because for the first time in my life, I had no magic. A whole arsenal of spells locked in my brain, from the good to the bad to the you-never-use-this, and I was just… stuck.
Tears burned my eyes, but I blinked them back and looked up, focusing on the fake lighting, on the aggressive fluorescent glow, so I could stop thinking about anything else—just for a few minutes.
At least there were potential allies in my corner. If Willow was telling the truth, then
maybe I could count on Elijah and Rafe for something more than being cellblock eye candy. Silver lining, I suppose.
That, and I now had a cafeteria buddy if Willow wasn’t a secret sociopath just searching for ways to manipulate me.
Unfortunately, as the alarms tolled and guards started barking for their cellblocks to get up and ship out, I was hit with a change of heart, indecision chipping away at me. No allies. No friends. They were all liabilities in here, right? Nor could I take anything anyone said at face value. As I joined the line for Cellblock C at the door we entered from, loitering behind maenad Constance and her bright pink hair as she heckled one of the cafeteria guards, I absorbed everything Willow had told me with a grain of salt. I’d judge Rafe and Elijah for myself, and if they were good guys, then great. Two less jerks to worry about in the place where I had to sleep.
I just preferred to escape this hellhole by myself—if only to ensure I didn’t owe anyone a damn thing.
Because in Xargi Penitentiary, I had a feeling any deal struck came with a price you could never, ever pay.
6
Elijah
Shockingly, showering was one of the few activities in this shithole that made you feel normal—like a free man, not a caged animal.
But only if you faced the wall, crouching slightly under the tepid spray, and kept your back to the warlock fucks loitering a few feet away.
And only if you didn’t pay too much attention to the gunk between the grout, the stalls in need of a serious deep clean.
Oh, and never mind that you were wearing ridiculous flimsy shoes that you bought in commissary, and that if you dared step onto the brown tile without them, you’d probably catch a foot fungus unlike any the world had ever seen.
Still. It was peaceful, in a way. Quiet. We were permitted to use the Cellblock C shower room every other day. The ordeal started two hours before breakfast: woken by a shrill alarm, inmates were required to stand in front of their cell doors, bleary-eyed and half-asleep, while two of our three permanent guards led inmates in pairs out for a brisk shower. If you didn’t have soap, couldn’t afford it, someone had stolen it from your cell—too fucking bad. Just stand under the terrible water pressure and soak it all in for five minutes.